Michael who is also the angel of death, weighing the soul, conveying it to where it must go.
Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the knife leave the ground. Then I saw, on the grey grass, the shadow of a raised blade extended from bowed arms.
Breath froze in my throat, silence roared in my ears. I saw the shadow of the blade at an oblique angle. Not the slender, fine-honed blade that beheaded Anne Boleyn in one stroke, but a rude butcher’s knife, made for mutton. I fell into prayer, as the shadow-blade twitched once and then fell with the echo of a cry across the night. Then came a brutal blow, my body tipping sideways, my head fallen heavily into the grass.
All shadow. Moments of emptiness, then wet splatter. Hot blood on my cheeks, in my mouth, in my eyes.
Through it, I saw the blade falling again and again and again. More blood flying up.
Up.
‘Up, John!’
The hand of God reaching down for me.
I didn’t move. Lay on my side, looking up through the blood into the face of Thomas Jones, his panicked eyes under a blur of madness and tears, as he kicked me over on to my back.
‘Get up, John… Get the fuck up…’
I could feel my hands, fingers flexing and then moving with an exploratory slowness to my neck, which somehow seemed yet to be held ’twixt my collar bones. Sitting up, now, in a pond of blood, looking down on the body of the big man, Roberts, heaving and squirming in the grass, his face a dark red carnival mask, and then flinching away from the sight of the thick blade coming down on him, and I heard Thomas Jones sob and, over the sickening splinter of bone, I heard the vixen shriek.
It came down the hillside with all the force of an arrow that would pierce my heart and, in a blinking, I was struggling to my feet. Fresh blood was slicked under my boots, and I stumbled and fell, dragged myself up again, scraping the salty blood from my eyes as I clambered up into the dregs of the night, and there was Prys Gethin creeping through the muddy dawn.
Quite some distance ahead of me, close to the church, something up there having trapped his attention.
A pale fluttering.
Gethin still now.
Standing, dagger in hand, feet apart. Waiting for the figure in the ragged white nightshirt to come down from the hill like a summoned ghost.
Oh, no. Oh dear God, no.
I ran crookedly up the steepening side of Brynglas. Stumbling twice and clawing at the grass. Knowing these two, black and white, would come together long before I could reach them, I began to cry out urgently and was answered, the way one owl answers another.
The nightshirt billowed. The long bone was raised. The vixen shriek resounded down the valley.
I saw what might have been the first pale rays of the rising sun in Prys Gethin’s blade as it was drawn quickly back and then pushed, with a practised ease, under the boy’s jaw.
Saw Gethin wipe the blade in the grass and stride away, not once looking back at any of us.
LII
The Wasting
I KNEW HE was gone before I reached him. The old white nightshirt lay around him like the flaccid feathers of a dead bird, slowly turning red under the bloody light of early dawn. His throat was laid open, as were his mad, unseeing eyes, to the awakening day.
Sick to my soul, I came to my knees beside him. He was quite still; his spirit had flit as lightly as a moth’s. I looked up, in dread, through the dimness for sign of his sister, but there was none, only her voice in my memory.
We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm.
I threw my fist with savagery at the turf, grief and pity turned into a useless rage, as Thomas Jones arrived at my shoulder. I looked up at him and at Brynglas, a melancholic grey without even the mystery of mist. As though the last small hope of spiritual relief for this damned hill had lodged for a while in Siôn Ceddol and now was snuffed out.
Thomas Jones was painfully panting, florid-faced, still holding the butcher’s knife, reddened to the handle.
‘Who’s this?’
‘Boy from the village. Armed—’ My voice choked on the senseless, wasteful cruelty of it. ‘Armed with a …’
I picked up the age-browned thigh bone from where it lay, close to Siôn Ceddol’s half-curled left hand. I’d not noticed he was left handed, a sinistral – though doubtless the rector would have. Another unfailing sign of the demonic. To Gethin, he’d have looked unearthly in the half light.
Like an angel.
‘He’ll kill anyone in his path, now,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You know that…’
Then he was bent over, coughing wretchedly, his hands bloodied to the wrists, the cuffs of his doublet blackened. He came up pointing towards the thickness of pines to the left of the church.
‘Went through there. The woods, not the churchyard.’
This brought me to my feet, dizzied for a moment, too long without sleep and bleeding from the head. The sky was the colour of ale. No sun yet. I looked down at Siôn Ceddol and his favourite bone, his open throat. I swallowed bile.
‘I’ll go after him.’
Took the butcher’s knife, its handle all clammy with blood and worse.
‘We’ l l go.’ Thomas Jones had me by the shoulders. ‘Listen… remember this. Don’t think to appeal to his reason. It’s gone. In the ruins of his mind, all is justified.’
‘What did he say to you? In Welsh.’
‘He said that only one of us need die. I weighed the odds and they weren’t good. I’ve seen Roberts take three men down in a street brawl. I did all I could think to do, which was to go with him… until the moment came.’
And what if the moment had not come? What if Gethin’s attention had not been snared by the vixen shriek and the fluttering figure in white who, unknowingly, may have given his life for mine?
I turned back towards the upper part of the hill, the high pines still black on the skyline.
‘What’s up there?’ Thomas Jones said.
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe the Rector’s house.’
Along with the wasting of an innocent life, maybe the most innocent, the thin brown light of dawn had brought a mournful uncertainty.
The pines closed around us like the pillars of a rude temple. Wandering from tree to tree, apparel stiffened with dried and drying blood, saying nothing, we must have looked like war-sick soldiers escaping the fray.
Moving with caution now, as most of the trees were well grown enough to hide a man. I’d no wish for us to die foolishly at Gethin’s hands. If he died at ours, I’d feel no regret, but how likely was that? We were soft-skinned men who lived in books – even Thomas Jones nowadays – and one of us vainly courted the angelic. The man we sought had skin like a lizard’s, was well-practised in the art of killing, driven by devils.
The wood was deeper than it had appeared from the slope below the church. It crested Brynglas and continued down the northern flank. Could be that these pines had grown upon the land where Rhys Gethin’s fiery army had waited for Edmund Mortimer’s trained soldiers, yeomen and peasants. And the Welsh archers who knew – or yet did not – what they’d do. When the moment came.
Maybe this was also where the women waited. The women who travelled with Gethin’s heroes and were said to have come scurrying down, after the battle, with their little knives.
Standing in that clearing, under a whitening sky, I threw down the butcher’s knife in horrified realisation of the recent carnage it had performed in the saving of the unworthy life of a conjurer who might never know what he’d conjured… a seer who saw nothing beyond the physical. The Wigmore shewstone was a useless weight in the front pouch of my jerkin. Had it not been for my futile pursuit of advancement and the engines of creation, we would not have come here and Siôn Ceddol would yet live. Let not this place be tainted by your presence, said Rector Daunce, perhaps, after all, with prescience.